Lars Nittve

July 27, 1997 | Christopher Knight, Christopher Knight is a Times art critic

With the Cold War over, Europe's future is no longer circumscribed by superpower struggles to the East and West. Fortune's enduring uncertainty remains, but its focus is shifting. The region is trying to sort out its changing identity, as it groans beneath the weight of powerful stresses and strains that make European Union a perilous issue. What will--indeed, what can--the new Europe be?

Like so many other things, time isn't what it used to be. At least not in the judgment of Lars Nittve, a youngish 45-year-old who organized the contemporary art exhibition "Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997," and who has taken up the post of director of the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art that is to open here in the year 2000. "The modern person's concept of time is changing with exposure to modern technologies," Nittve said.

Like so many other things, time isn't what it used to be. At least not in the judgment of Lars Nittve, a youngish 45-year-old who organized the contemporary art exhibition "Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997," and who has taken up the post of director of the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art that is to open here in the year 2000. "The modern person's concept of time is changing with exposure to modern technologies," Nittve said.

July 27, 1997 | Christopher Knight, Christopher Knight is a Times art critic

With the Cold War over, Europe's future is no longer circumscribed by superpower struggles to the East and West. Fortune's enduring uncertainty remains, but its focus is shifting. The region is trying to sort out its changing identity, as it groans beneath the weight of powerful stresses and strains that make European Union a perilous issue. What will--indeed, what can--the new Europe be?

Hong Kong's M+, the long-awaited art museum to be built in the city's West Kowloon Cultural District, officially has an architecture team. The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has been selected to design the museum, along with the London-Hong Kong firm TFP Farrells. M+ is scheduled to be completed in 2017 and will be a key part of the city's new cultural district, a waterfront development that will serve as home to visual and performing arts organizations. Planners hope the $642-million museum will become one of the world's top modern and contemporary art destinations on the level of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Herzog & de Meuron said it was selected based on a recommendation from an international jury.

MOVIES An Action Actor Takes Action As Congress bears down on Hollywood for peddling violent fare to children, Jet Li, star of "Kiss of the Dragon," has issued a cautionary word about the 20th Century Fox film opening July 6. " 'Kiss of the Dragon' is an adult movie and deals with adult themes . . . [and] utilizes very realistic, hard-core, action-packed fight sequences," Li cautioned on his Web site, http://www.jetli.com. "The movie is rated R.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is close to naming a new director, sources say, and the leading candidate is Michael J. Govan, director of the New York-based Dia Art Foundation and a specialist in contemporary art. After a quarterly museum trustees meeting Wednesday, the facility's top staff and board officials stressed that no vote had been taken to appoint a new director, and museum employees said no staff announcement had been made.

L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art says it will name its new director Monday, and one of the names in play is that of Jeffrey Deitch, a high-flying New York City art dealer who, if chosen, would represent a break with art museum convention. Neither the museum, nor arts patron Eli Broad -- whose $30-million pledge was the cornerstone of the museum's rescue from financial peril in late 2008 -- would comment on the finalists for the job. "We've interviewed about 13 people and no decision has been made yet, by either the search committee or the board, but we hope that will happen soon," Broad said.

Following a critically successful yearlong tour of European museums, the much-anticipated exhibition "Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997" arrives today in the city where its 100-plus paintings, sculptures, photographs, installation works and artists' books were made by its 47 chosen artists.

For more than a decade this has been one of the two liveliest cities in the rapidly globalizing art world. Los Angeles is the other, where a similarly dense concentration of interesting new artists continues to emerge. Today, as London unveils to the public the eagerly anticipated Tate Modern, its knockout new museum for art made since 1900, consider an L.A. precedent. Sixteen years ago the Museum of Contemporary Art's renovated warehouse space in L.A.'

EARLY next month, much of the local art world will decamp for Paris for a taste of its history as seen through French eyes. "Los Angeles 1955-1985," the Pompidou Center's survey of L.A. art during an invigorating period, will open March 8 with about 350 works by 87 artists, and though the roster is broad, it's been a hot topic of conversation and contention. Is it a love letter to Los Angeles artists from Paris? A skewed view of L.A. art from the Eiffel Tower? A French interpretation of the L.A.

The powerhouse behind London's old powerhouse-turned-modern art museum is Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota, a button-down Englishman who appears to the world as shy, earnest and reserved. He is that, with a permanently furrowed brow and eyes of searing concentration. But these days Serota's serious face tends to break into a sudden boyish grin that hints at a joy verging on giddiness. And smile he should.